Surveillance staffing levels should be primarily dictated by what? (Poll Closed)

It wasn’t until I received a call for assistance from a colleague in Oklahoma, for some guidelines in proper departmental staffing, that I realized that this is not always as simple a decision as I used to think it was. Although all of the reasons listed play their part, location, property amenities, gaming limits, marketing, facility designs also play their small roles. It boils down to determining the required work load and proper protective measures. These two things are quite different, and if you find that it is difficult to provide sufficient protection to have your department run efficiently, it is probably because another department head has tasked your department with an unnecessary work load that is tying up your assets from proactively finding sufficient correctable situations to do so. It's funny that I was working on a paper regarding this topic when this issue of the catwalk dinged on my computer.

I also thought that every answer on the list had it's place in the staffing decision. Maybe a better idea would be to ask what percentage that each topic makes up the final staffing decision.

For me, I just applied this very simple mathmatical equation for my optimum staffing. You merely have to add time of day or time of week (which is a traffic issue) plus number of games, plus square footage, plus gaming revenue, plus number of cameras, plus number of venues (restaurants, hotel, event center, etc.), plus the OTHER (we all know those: special favors of watch this, watch that, keep an eye on this for me, my boss wants us to watch that) divided by amount of budgeted payroll dollars minus the "we really need to cut payroll where we can", and multiplied that by pi squared and divided that by the circumference of the parking lot (in inches) and came up with the perfect number for my facility.

It really is hard. I was kidding about the easy equation thing.

in my experiance, and i can only speak to indian gaming, staffing levels are based on work load, due to our state compact, internal controls and regulatory requirments, there are many things that are required by surveillance on a daily basis and then there are the projects and audits that also need to be completed. With the reasearch i have done if i were to use machine count and the number of table games, i would be overstaffed. How ever, much of the time it can feel as though we are two to three FTE's understaffed. Just a thought.